brainstorming

Weyco - Smoking Nazis

Yes, I understand the adage that when you get to accusing someone of Nazism you've lost the debate, but I couldn't think of a more fitting description.  Of course I'm talking about this story:

Four employees of Okemos-based health benefits administrator Weyco Inc. have been fired for refusing to take a test that would determine whether they smoke cigarettes.

The company instituted a policy on Jan. 1 that makes it a firing offense to smoke -- even if done after business hours or at home, the Lansing State Journal reported Monday.

Their reasoning is they don't want to pay for the health care costs associated with smoking.  Their CFO is oh so proud of their success:

Climes estimated that about 18 to 20 of the company's 200 employers were smokers when the policy was announced in 2003.

Of those, as many as 14 quit smoking before the policy went into place. Weyco offered them smoking cessation help, Climes said.

"That is absolutely a victory," Climes said.

This is health discrimination plain and simple.  Let's play the discrimination game.  You know how it goes.  We replace smoking with other health care issues and see if the policy continues to sound so wise.  For example:

"I don't want to pay for the results of those 5 gin and tonics my CFO has after work."

"I don't want to pay for the results of the unprotected sex Boyd in the mailroom has every weekend."

"I don't want to pay for the results of that donut habit Jenny in accounting has."

I'm sure the CFO would consider the victory just as wonderful if the company monitored his sex life, what he ate, and any consumption of alcohol, right?  "Oh, and we've offered Boyd chemical castration so he can keep his job.  Isn't it a wonderful victory!"

Next we can move on to genetic tendencies, because a lot of heart issues and cancers spring from genetic dispositions, right?  The goal is to control health care costs after all.  The next thing you know, we're living in Gattaca.

I hope the fired employees sue and take them for more than their health care costs ever could have been.  We have to stop the nanny state somewhere.

Smoking Disclaimer:  Smoking sucks.  I know.  I started when I was young and stupid.  I hope you never start.  I wouldn't recommend it to my enemies.  However it doesn't change the fact that a company should not be able to fire their employees for legal activities done on their own time.

Environmentalism or Eco-Imperialism?

FrontPage Magazine has an excellent interview with Paul Driessen, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death. Excerpt:

FP: When you look at what these radical environmentalists are doing, it becomes clear that they couldn’t really care less about the environment, or the people for whom they purport to speak. They exploit environmental concerns to camouflage their hatred of their own society and their ferocious war to destroy capitalism and civil society. That’s what this is really all about isn’t it?

Driessen: I think that’s a pretty fair summation. Michael Crichton calls environmentalism “one of the most powerful religions in the world today.” What it espouses has little to do with science or reality. It’s all a matter of blind faith, part of a quest for an eco-utopia, a return to some mythical Garden of Eden.

Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore argues that the movement really became radicalized after the fall of the Berlin Wall and USSR. That’s when hordes of activists left their Communist Party jobs and joined the environmental movement – bringing their anti-business, anti-American, anti-science, anti-trade, anti-civilization extremism with them.

Concealed Carry Veto Override Fails 64-35

I'm not going to mince words. I am genuinely ticked off. I'm pissed off and I'm fed up.

I'm annoyed with people who disregard facts.....No......misrepresent facts......because they believe they are elite, and know what is best for us "little people".

What kind of man believes in the rights of the people, co-sponsors legislation to see those rights reinstated, attempts to persuade others of his cause, then when the vote comes down to him.....when his vote alone stands between restoring freedom to the citizens of Wisconsin or continuing to deny their rights......he abandons his principles for purely political reasons?

This sorry excuse for a man is named Gary Sherman.

This behavior is in direct opposition to the values we hold dear, enough that for once google bombing seems appropriate:

Sorry Excuse For a Man
Sorry Excuse for a Man
Sorry Excuse for a Man

Abandons Beliefs for Political Gain
Abandons Beliefs for Political Gain
Abandons Beliefs for Political Gain

Putting Party Loyalty Before Liberty
Putting Party Loyalty Before Liberty
Putting Party Loyalty Before Liberty

OK. I'm going to stop now......while I still can. Forgive me fellow travelers for stooping so low.

Readjusting to conservative mode where logic really does count for something.

So. Close. 64-35.

Please thank the Wisconsin Senators and Assembly members that supported the veto override. Our time will come again.

Please feel free to join me in supporting a Republican opponent in the 74th disctrict. I will so enjoy celebrating his loss on election night.

Finally, Owen is much more upbeat and positive than I am at this moment. Stop by and thank him for keeping us all up to speed.

Illegal Immigrant - Catch and Release Program

Someone please notify Michelle Malkin. This is ridiculous in a post 09/11 world, (USA Today):

Thousands of illegal immigrants, mostly from Central and South America, are being released into the USA almost immediately after they are picked up by the Border Patrol as part of a policy that U.S. officials acknowledge represents a significant gap in homeland security.

****

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says that in 2003, as many as 6,000 illegals entered the USA under the government's "catch and release" policy. Officials in U.S. border towns and other critics say the policy threatens local residents' safety and undermines security along the Southwestern border at a time when counterterrorism officials believe al-Qaeda operatives could be focusing on Mexico as an entry point to the USA.

****

He says the policy is driven by the lack of federal money to rent space in local jails to detain illegal aliens. The U.S. government pays localities about $54 a day to house each detainee, and in January housed more than 22,600 illegal aliens — above its budgeted capacity of 19,444.

***

He says that illegals are run through basic background checks before they are released. They are fingerprinted and their names are checked against government databases of known criminals.

"Is that enough?" Venturella asks. "Probably not."

****

Two weeks ago, unable to continue paying for the detentions of 76 illegal aliens from Central America, the Border Patrol directed Sheriff Jernigan to take all of them to the Del Rio bus station. There, many of them caught buses to continue their journeys to Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.

"We didn't know who these people were or what their intentions were," Alcala says. "They all were released with these notices to appear (in court) at some date in the future. But do you honestly think there was any chance of that? I don't think so."

Read the whole thing if you can stomach it.

Dean - Now with 500% More "God" and Jesus" References

Stolen, with permission from the incomparable, original Moxie:

Maybe it's because I've been out of the loop due to the holidays, but I didn't see a lot of blog commentary on the Dean flip flop on religion, first saying southerners should stop voting based on "race, guns, God, and gays", then telling the Boston Globe that he expects to increasingly include references to Jesus and God in his speeches as he stumps in the South.

Because Jesus is cool to talk about if He can get you some votes, right?

Frontpage sums it up nicely in Howard Dean's Politics of Bad Faith:

Dean made it clear, however, that he would be discussing his Christian faith only in Southern states, the states he stereotyped two months ago as being full of rednecks with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks.

The reasons for Dean’s hypocritical flip-flop are obvious. A recent ABC/Washington Post poll showed that 46 percent of Southerners said a president should rely on his religious beliefs when making policy decisions. Forty percent of people nationwide share this view, but only 28 percent of Easterners agree. Dean stuck his wetted finger into the Southern breeze and is now reversing his rhetorical sails to gain votes by professing beliefs he mocked only weeks ago.

Um Howard, those pickup people vote, you see, and they believe in God, you see, so what we need you to do in the South........

What is missing from Dean’s picture? To devout Christians, Jesus Christ is infinitely more than a social worker or political activist. Christ is a loving God who became human, delivered the Creator’s message and example of divine love to humankind, and willingly became the sacrificial lamb of a new Passover whose crucifixion and resurrection saves those who believe in Him from the fear of death.

The Jesus envisioned by Howard Dean is godless.

Dean’s Jesus is nothing more than a gee-whiz fictional superhero who is “pretty inspiring,” who liberally heals the consequences of sin but never violates Political Correctness by saying, “Repent and sin no more.” Howard Dean’s Jesus tells people to love their neighbor but never asks them also to love God.

See it's just so much easier if you make up your own God and put Him in that special box where you get to decide which traits you want to keep and which are inconvenient to your own set of beliefs.

And here's a bit I hadn't heard before.............

Howard Dean also served as a Board Member of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. And around the time of his three-year residency at a teaching facility called the Medical Center Hospital of Vermont (now the Fletcher Allen Hospital) in Burlington, Dean reportedly in 1978 or 1979 served as an intern in an OB/GYN rotation at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Burlington. Dean reportedly continued as a physician at this Planned Parenthood clinic after his internship, “providing routine GYN care and medical consults.”

Howard Dean, M.D., has avoided answering questions about whether he ever performed an abortion – or how many he might have performed. He strongly opposed the recently passed bill to ban partial-birth abortion, and he has favored allowing girls to get abortions without parental notification or permission. But if the Jesus of his United Church of Christ is pro-abortion, then why has Dean avoided answering whether he himself has performed abortions?

Has Howard Dean performed abortions? Has the leading Democratic presidential candidate been an abortion provider? Surely if it we needed to know boxers or briefs, this is pertinent? Inquiring minds want to know.

Environmentalism is a Religion

Bountiful thanks to Chaos Central for sharing a link to this Michael Crichton speech to the Common Wealth Club. It's like he stole the thoughts from my very own head.

I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.

...

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

I agree that humans are hard wired to look for God. Just because some now believe we are beyond that does not make it true. We have only replaced God with other things.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.

...

Well, it's interesting. You may have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected turn.

...

Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they're human. So what. Unfortunately, it's not just one prediction. It's a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.

...

So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven't read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don't report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn.

I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.

I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won't impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.

You simply MUST read the whole thing.

DC

Bush Not Allowed on IL Ballot?

In Illinois, in 2004, the name of George W. Bush will not, as of now, be allowed on the ballot.

State law specifies that the ballot must be certified in August; but the GOP National Convention isn't until September. So, a minor change in the law was required. But instead of simply making the change, the Democratic legislative leadership tacked a provision onto the bill that would allow the State Board of Elections to waive a bunch of election law fines, including a whopping $797,600 judgment against Secretary of State Jesse White, and others against no less than 14 Democratic Senators, none of whom bothered to recuse himself from the vote. Senate Republicans rightly refused to support such a blatantly corrupt measure, so the bill failed, and unless it is revised, Bush's name will not be on the ballot in Illinois; to win the state's electoral votes he will have to run a write-in campaign.

The bill could be brought up again in the spring, but according to Chicago Sun- Times columnist Thomas Roeser, the Democratic leadership is promising "that the same conditions will be applied next year."

Read the whole thing here.

DC

Doyle's Thanksgiving

Owen at Boots and Sabers exposes the latest maneuvering by our not so illustrious governor, Jim Doyle.

Sneaky vetoes here and a rigged election here.

DC

Activist Admits Sending China Technology

Apparently it's not only some European countries who are prone to forget who their friends are:

A human rights activist whom the U.S. government helped free from a Chinese prison in 2001 pleaded guilty Wednesday to illegally sending $1.5 million worth of high-tech items to China.

Gao Zhan entered the plea in federal court in Alexandria, Va., to one count of unlawful export and another count of tax evasion. Her husband, Xue Donghua, also pleaded guilty to tax evasion.

Gao, a permanent U.S. resident alien, was arrested by Chinese authorities in February 2001 and convicted of spying for Taiwan. She was released after five months in jail under intense pressure from the U.S. government and worked until spring 2002 as a researcher at American University here.

According to federal prosecutors, from August 1998 through 2001 Gao ran Technology Business Services, a business specializing in exports of technology to China. The exports were made to Chinese companies tied to ``institutes'' which perform research and development for the Chinese government, including the Chinese military.

Among the items sent to China were microprocessors that can be used in digital flight control and weapons systems, including identification of targets. Although these microprocessors also have commercial uses, they cannot be exported without permission of the U.S. government.

If you can stomach it, read the whole thing here, (link via Instapundit.)

DC

E-Mail Tax?????????

Steve introduces us to the worst idea ever floated:

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- If Congress is going to stop unsolicited commercial e-mail from swamping computer users, Sen. Mark Dayton says legislators might need to consider "It's difficult to prevent the use of spam when there's no cost associated with sending thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of e-mails," Dayton, D-Minn., said in a recent conference call with reporters.

Dayton said a tax on e-mail should be studied along with other proposals to crack down on spam, but he stressed that he is not advocating it. "It's just one of the tactics that should be considered, but I don't favor it at this time," he said.

Mark Dayton plays the scarecrow....."If I only had a brain"

UGH!

DC